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THE FINDING OF 
THE CROSS 


E. HERMAN 





/ 
THE FINDING OF 
THE CROSS 


/ BY 


/ 
E. HERMAN 


Author of “The Meaning and Value of 
Mysticism”, “Creative Prayer”, “The 
Secret Garden of the Soul’, ete. 


NEW GP vom 


GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY 


Copyright, 1926, 
By George H. Doran Company 


THE FINDING OF THE CROSS 





PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


TO 
tad yd te 
AND 
CAB. 
in Gratitude 


M. H. 


ve 
ash) 





PREFACE 


WHEN these consecutive Lenten studies first 
appeared in the Church Times, it was felt by 
an ever-increasing number of people who 
looked to my late wife for light and guidance 
that they embodied some of her best and ripest 
thought and were of singular and lasting value, 
and a desire was expressed in many quarters 
that they should be issued in permanent form. 
With the exception of a few minor verbal cor- 
rections, they now appear exactly as she left 
them. 

The title, “The Finding of the Cross,” is 
taken from the heading of Chapter VII. I 
think it may most appropriately stand for the 
volume as a whole, inasmuch as one of the 
chief objects of Lent is to help us towards a 
fresh discovery of the Cross and its implica- 
tions for daily life, and all the seven chapters 
treat of the way along which we are to travel 
in order to reach that goal. 

9 


Preface 


The tributes rendered to my wife reveal that 
thousands of men and women in many lands 
have been enlightened in mind and stimulated 
in heart by a study of her writings, and this 
book is sent forth in the hope and with the 
prayer that many more, in all sections of the 
Church Catholic, may by this her final mes- 
sage—so profound, yet so practical—be helped 
in their search for spiritual reality and in their 
endeavour to reach a higher standard of noble 
and holy living. 

My warmest thanks are due to the Editor 
of the Church Times for his kind permission to 
reprint these studies, 

M. HERMAN. 


PREFACE 

CHAPTER 

I. Tue Joy or PENITENCE . 

II. Tue Mystery or MorTIFICATION . 
Ill. Tue TreAsureE oF SILENCE 
IV. THe Gory or PATIENCE 

V. THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THOUGHT . 
VI. Tue ADVENTURE OF ENDURANCE 
VII. Tuer FINDING OF THE Cross 


CONTENTS 





THE FINDING OF THE CROSS 


ih 


. 

YN x 

es 
Mae S" 


aa, 


Naat h 
he bb te Sey 
Wy ad 1 Oy met 





CHAPTER I 
THE JOY OF PENITENCE 


Remember, O man! To the youthful heart, 
the threshold of Lent is chill with the breath 
of decay. Ashes for remembrance—with that 
the reluctant soul enters Lent’s grey precincts 
and prepares for long, sunless days of peniten- 
tial duty. As the days go on, their steady dis- 
cipline acts as a bracing tonic, but the first 
touch of Ash Wednesday is spectral and men- 
acing to many in whom the love of sunshine 
and laughter is strong. But to those who have 
lost their first hot grasp upon life, it is not the 
thought of mortality that makes the call to 
remembrance unwelcome. For then the sting 
of memory is not death but sin, and their only 
fear of Lent is that it may pass without having 
taught them that art of remembering well 
which is the A B C of repentance. 


I 


We know from experience how unsanctify- 
ing the remembrance of sin can be, and how 
13 


14 The Finding of the Cross 


alarmingly its echoes may awaken a whole 
black cavernful of hurtful emotions. We know 
the impure passion of remorse that doubles the 
soul back upon itself in gnawing impotence; 
the self-torturing shame whose blush leaves a 
stain; the blighting dejection born of wounded 
self-esteem; the weary melancholy and sterile 
regret that drain the spirit; and, at the last, the 
dull paralysis that follows vainly-spent ener- 
gies. And so we have, again and again per- 
haps, run through the whole gamut of self- 
regarding emotion without having felt peni- 
tence or achieved repentance. Begun in un- 
fruitful sorrow, our Lent ended in dull per- 
functoriness; and Easter brought a sense of 
relief, eloquent, not of the joy of the forgiven, 
but rather of the boredom of the self-dis- 
illusioned. 

It does not take us long to recognize that 
the root of our failures in repentance is self- 
love. It is our self-love that breeds that de- 
structive sadness which contracts the mind and 
warps the soul. Past acts of indiscretion and 
folly, committed without malice aforethought, 
fester into present sins of pride, as they are 
brooded over by our outraged self-respect. We 


~The Joy of Pemtence 15 


seek self-knowledge by peering into our own 
darkness, instead of holding up our souls to 
the Divine light, and are vexed but remain 
uncontrite. We are scorched by ignoble shame, 
but its fire leaves our meannesses unconsumed. 
Our defections sting us to self-contempt, but 
though we bite the dust in humiliation, we 
come no nearer humility. And knowing that 
the wound of self-love is likely to bleed again 
at the slightest touch, and that the tricks of 
self-love are legion, what reason have we for 
supposing that this Lent will find us immune 
- from its myriad deceptions? 


II 


Perhaps the best way of escape is to recall 
to ourselves wherein true repentance consists 
and what are the fruits of penitence. That 
means to think well upon things we have learnt 
to call commonplaces by reason of our own 
commonplace apprehension of them. As we 
realize their depth and height, we shall make 
our Lenten reading a study of the conceptions 
of compunction of heart, penitence, penance, 
and repentance, as we find them in the New 
Testament especially, and in the great ascetical 


16 The Finding of the Cross 


writers. (There is no need to disparage small 
books wholesale; a small book may serve as 
a gate into a large world of spirituai reality.) 
And even the simplest study will avail to im- 
print once more upon our forgetful minds the 
fundamental truth that repentance is not a 
self-regarding but a God-regarding activity; 
that St. Thomas Aquinas was profoundly right 
when he said that the root of all things is 
Mercy; and that penitential sorrow is justi- 
fied by its threefold fruit of joy, vision, and 
courage. 


Til 


Of these fruits joy seems the most remote— 
at any rate, in certain moods. Perhaps the 
ultimate reason for this is that when we think 
of joy we are accustomed to conceive of it as 
having its root either in ourselves or in our 
response to happy circumstances. The case is 
otherwise with pain and sorrow. Catholic 
teaching has familiarized us with the idea of 
vicarious suffering and of participation in sor- 
rows not our own. And even a superficial 
acquaintance with the mystics takes us a step 


The Joy of Pemtence 17 


further, in showing how the dedicated soul may - 
be caught up into a pain and agony that have 
their roots, neither in personal emotion, nor 
in the mysterious movement of suffering sym- 
pathy, but solely in the agony of our Lord upon 
the Cross, which is permitted, as it were, to 
overflow into the heart that could of itself 
know no such pain. 

The joy born of penitence comes somewhat 
after the same fashion. It does not well up 
from the penitent soul; it is not even merely 
the conscious joy of forgiveness. It flows into 
the soul from that Fountain of Joy which 
springs up within angelic hearts, whose source 
is in the very Being of God. It is part of the 
unique and unearthly gladness of the angels 
in heaven over one sinner that repenteth; and 
it comes only to the soul that is humble and 
brave enough to seek no joy for herself in the 
cup of penitential sorrow, but leaves to the 
citizens of heaven the wine that is salt tears 
to her own palate. 

It is therefore in vain that we try to excite 
ourselves to joy at penitential seasons. When 
our Lord looked for friends and neighbours to 


18 The Finding of the Cross 


rejoice with Him over the sheep that was lost, 
He could find them no nearer than heaven. 
The flower of joy that we seek never yet grew 
on human soil. 

Yet we can do something to hasten the com- 
ing of that joy. Itis a very simple thing, and, 
perhaps for that very reason, the last thing 
we think of doing. Weare told of St. Jerome 
that one Christmas night he wished to give a 
present to the Infant Jesus. First he offered 
the Lord his works on the Holy Scriptures, 
then his labours for the conversion of souls, 
then such virtues of his as he was able to 
offer. But all this was not what the Lord 
wanted. “Jerome,” He said, “it is thy sins 
I wished for. Give them to Me that I may 
pardon them.” 

We too are ready to offer everything but 
the one thing to our Lord. We show Him our 
poor efforts, our laborious penances, We are 
impelled to offer Him our sorrows and dis- 
appointments: and that is well. Only our sins 
we hug to our bosoms, turning them towards 
ourselves and writhing with shame, instead of 
turning them towards Him and being humbled 
by His joy at our confidence. That there is 


The Joy of Penitence 19 


more real repentance in perfect trust than in 
any other action is a truth we are very slow 
to learn, 

“The hour of a man’s pardon,” says Origen, 
“is a festival-day for Jesus Christ”; and it is 
when we make a feast-day for our Lord that 
we first come to know that joy is indeed hidden 
within the bitterness of penitential sorrow. 


IV 


The roots of joy lie deepest in the soil of 
repentance, but it is the fruit of vision that 
is generally the first to ripen. We have read 
the stories of the Woman that was a Sinner 
and of the Penitent Thief so often, and, it must 
be confessed, so mindlessly, that we have been 
dulled to their stinging challenge. At the heart 
of their comforting assurance lies a sting which 
pricked Jewish self-righteousness and pagan 
arrogance alike into centuries of venemous re- 
taliation, and still pricks the Pharisee and the 
pagan that slumber in every human soul. For 
these stories tell us that the outcast and de- 
spised sometimes have what in mean moments 
we incline to call a “trick” of discerning’ the 
Divine Glory, where the respectable and re- 


20 The Finding of the Cross 


spected can only see the grey homespun of com- 
mon humanity. A woman who was accounted 
as the mud of the streets, and accounted her- 
self as such, sees a travel-worn mendicant sit- 
ting slighted at a virtuous man’s table, and 
recognizes in Him the world’s most illustrious 
citizen and heaven’s centre of adoration, the 
Divine-Human Saviour-Friend of all who sin 
and suffer. A dying outlaw of the brutal type 
looks from his cross of agony at the mangled 
wreck of manhood on the cross next to him, 
and sees, through blood and tears, the King 
Who holds the keys of Paradise. Whence had 
they, of all mortals, such piercing clarity of 
spiritual vision? The answer ought to stab 
us with self-reproach. It was because they 
saw as we do not see. We see with our minds, 
or our emotions, or our sentimental or artistic 
susceptibilities; they saw with the eyes of 
broken and contrite hearts. 

And if we have to deplore a dearth of vision 
among us, or, more fatal still, an epidemic of 
spurious vision, it is because the light of peni- 
tence burns dim. It is quite easy to have 
the false vision which the thousand-and-one 
pseudo-mystical cults encourage. Self-decep- 


The Joy of Pemtence 7 21 


tion is always fatally easy, and the Devil can 
counterfeit all gifts and graces except one— 
the contrite heart. Pharisee and pagan alike 
are readily captivated by the glory that en- 
circles the brows of false Christs: the contrite 
soul alone remains unsatisfied until she has 
seen the print of the nails. 


V 


As with vision, so with that heroic devotion 
which makes the saint. We implore God to 
give saints to His Church in these difficult days. 
There will be more saints when there are more 
penitents, and better penitents. We look back 
upon the early ages of the Church, when her 
greatest saints were at once her most learned 
doctors and her most profound penitents. 
They came from the mire of a decadent pagan- 
ism, and their conversion was wrought of blood 
and tears, and born of an agony of penitence 
that seems remote as an old-world legend to 
us to-day. We remember the heroic Ages of 
Faith, and our ears are filled with the weeping 
of men and women who were penitents before 
they were saints, and greater penitents as they 
erew in sainthood. Their tears still bathe the 


22 The Finding of the Cross 


feet of Christ. Their sorrow was the measure 
of a love that dared greatly. 

The Penitent Thief forgot his agony and 
the jeers of the crowd in acclaiming his King. 
He gathered up his dying strength into a con- 
fession whose daring we can but vaguely meas- 
ure. The Woman that was a Sinner brake 
the box, and its perfume filled the house of 
contempt and arrogance. The great aureoled 
penitents of the Christian ages strike shame 
to our timid hearts by the reckless magnificence 
of their devotion, the sheer audacity of their 
love. 

We do not break the box of conventional 
penance and pedestrian duty, because only the 
fingers of penitential love can shatter its sub- 
stance. We miss the adventure of the Christian 
life because we love too little, and we love too 
little because we see too dimly, and we see so 
dimly because we are so slow to repent. But 
as humble penitence grows, the unimaginable 
love of Christ is revealed. Then love answers 
Love; the box of self is shattered, and Easter 
joy breaks through the greyness of Lenten 
sorrow. 


CHAPTER II 
THE MYSTERY OF MORTIFICATION 


ONcE more that restless, myriad-faced entity 
commonly called “the modern mind” is devel- 
oping a sense of mystery. It has wearied of 
the clear, thin doctrine of rationalism; sick- 
ened of the thick, square religion of positivism; 
outgrown the crass negations of secularism. 
Once more it is attempting to launch out into 
the deep, lured by the mystery at the core of 
life. And since it confuses depth with unintel- 
ligibility and mystery with bombastic vague- 
ness, it lends a ready ear to the pseudo-mystic 
and to the fluent purveyor of New Thought 
who offer to hypnotize it “into tune with the 
Infinite,” or to initiate it into the art of swelling 
itself out into a “super-mind” and mastering 
all of life there is to master. 


I 


But if the so-called “modern mind” is once 
more falling in love with mystery, it is none 
23 


24 The Finding of the Cross 


the less as much out of love as ever with that 
region of our mysterious life which is the 
peculiar domain of mortification. Indeed, it 
would deny that mortification and mystery 
have anything in common. The one is the 
essence of life, the other its flat dental. 
Frankly, we have little patience with the idea 
of mortification. To most of us it is part of 
that dreary infatuation with death, that morbid 
lust of repression, that underground conspiracy 
against life itself which we call medizeval ascet- 
icism. We have outgrown a religion expressed 
in negatives. We crave for the positive. We 
want, not life only, but life more abundant. 
And in this we think to reproduce the mind of 
Christ. 

And yet, when we look closely at this im- 
pressionable age of ours, with its passion for 
positive, joyous life and its doctrine of un- 
trammelled self-expression, we do not find that 
it is characterized by that vigour and blitheness 
which one connects with “life more abundant.” 
Indeed, the devotees of the new cult of life 
are strangely anemic and pulseless, and an 
hour in their company leaves one considerably 
depressed. The more talk there is about life, 


The Mystery of Mortification 25 


the less of the reality can be traced. The 
reason is not far to seek. These hectic lovers 
of life have failed to discover its secret, for 
they have sought it in life, whereas they should 
have looked for it in death. At the centre 
of life is a mystery of death, the secret of the 
grain of wheat which, except it die, cannot 
rise to life and bear fruit. That is why morti- 
fication, the art of dying daily, so far from 
being the negation of life, is its indispensable 
condition. 

But mortification is negative, we insist, and 
the soul cannot live on negations. Mortifica- 
tion is cloistered, monastic; and we moderns 
shrink from the cloister. When we assist at 
monastic office, what do we hear, the first thing 
in the morning, when the positive sun pierces 
the sky and the glad birds shrill their positive 
note against the stillness? 

Now that the daylight fills the sky, 

We lift our hearts to God on high, 


That He, in all we do or say, 
Would keep us free from harm to-day: 


Would guard our hearts and tongues from strife; 
From anger’s din would hide our life; 

From all ill sights would turn our eyes; 

Would close our ears from vanities. 


26 The Finding of the Cross 


It is negative from first to last. What if that 
prayer be answered? What if we are kept 
free from harm that day and saved from cer- 
tain evils? Will that of itself make us any 
better? Is the meek and incurious oyster really 
a nobler creature than the restless and destruc- 
tive lion? 


II 


Such reasoning is plausible enough on the 
surface, but it will not stand the test of reality. 
Richard Jefferies—by no means an advocate 
of cloistered virtue—shatters it, en passant, 
with a little parable. He was in the habit of 
coming out of doors at night to feast his eyes 
upon a brilliant star which dominated the sky 
at that particular season. One night he came 
out as usual, but, though the skies were clear, 
there was no star to greet him. Puzzled, he 
stood and looked. Then, suddenly, a light wind 
stirred a tree, a leaf blew aside, and lo! the 
star. The moving aside of a little leaf—how 
barrenly negative! The star, with its mighty 
suggestion, its thrilling wonder, its subduing 
awe—how positive! 

Or to come closer to human life. A drunk- 


The Mystery of Mortification 27 


ard is induced at last to forswear strong drink. 
He keeps his promise, and, by dint of a hard 
struggle, quells the imperious craving. How 
very negative that is! A man is not necessar- 
ily the better for being sober; he may exchange 
the headlong generosity of the drunkard for 
the smug self-righteousness of the prig. But 
what happens? As drink is given up and 
sobriety restores the broken-down fibre, fam- 
ily affection reappears, daily work becomes in- 
teresting, the love of music or of reading re- 
awakens, the spiritual instinct leaps into life. 
The negative has released the positive; the 
moving of the leaf has unveiled the star, 


III 

“Know well,” says that master of ascetic 
wisdom, Thomas a Kempis, “that thou oughtest 
to lead a dying life.” We are slow to believe 
this, and so we die fatally because we refuse to 
die. Mortification is not an optional accom- 
plishment, a peculiar achievement belonging to 
candidates for canonization, or, at any rate, 
a heroic measure adopted by strenuous Catho- 
lics during Lent, to be dropped at the first peal 
of Easter bells. Or perhaps we concede its 


28 The Finding of the Cross 


importance, and even necessity, for natures 
hag-ridden by vices or tortured by passions, 
for people of hot blood in whom the lust of 
life runs riot, or people of incontinent ambi- 
tion in whom the pride of life is rampant. We 
forget that, more often than not, it only takes 
a frail leaf to blot out a whole world of light. 
What of that dissipation of soul that finds 
so harmless an outlet in quite good-natured 
talk, and yet bars the way to prayer and recol- 
lection as effectually as frivolity or evil-living? 
What of the constitutional laziness, the gen- 
eral slackness, which issues in nothing more 
than sinless ease, and yet shuts us out from 
fellowship with our Crucified Lord as effectu- 
ally as any vicious habit? What of the love 
of praise, or the infirmity of purpose, or the 
weak complaisance, which puts us outside the 
ranks of Christ’s soldiery as completely as 
theft or drunkenness? We may call these 
things dead leaves on our tree of life, but it 
sometimes takes a mighty storm to blow down 
the leaf that hides a star. 

But is not that too much like Jansenism to 
be safe or wholesome? It would be, if death 
were the end instead of the means: if we spent 


The Mystery of Mortification 29 


our years in moving leaves that hid no star. 
But there is a star, and already the leaf 
trembles. 


IV 


To-day there is, even in the most unlikely 
quarters, an increasing interest in Prayer and 
in the interior life in general. Books on Mys- 
ticism and manuals of interior practice are in 
demand once more. And again and again one 
meets earnest readers of such literature who 
are sorrowfully enquiring why they cannot 
even catch a fleeting glimpse of that land which 
is the mystic’s home. They admit the possi- 
bility—the probability, even—of their lacking 
a vocation for the higher reaches of the in- 
terior life; but might they not attain at least 
to that acquired contemplation which is the 
birthright of all aspiring souls? They long 
for the magic, the thrll, the adventure of 
the life of prayer and communion—why are 
they kept entirely outside those realms of 
gold? 

The answer is simple, though not easy. 
Through those realms, from the grey confines 
to the frontiers of Eternity, there runs the 


30 The Finding of the Cross 


Purgative Way—the way of mortification. It 
is trodden plain by the feet of the humble who 
have attained the Vision Splendid, but preju- 
dice keeps many an earnest soul from walking 
in it. There are things about that way which 
appal us. It begins in mortification of the 
flesh, it proceeds in the mortification of natural 
impulses, it ends in the mortification of spirit- 
ual desires. It is only with the two first ele- 
ments that we need to reckon in the earlier 
part of our pilgrimage. The mortification of 
the flesh does not attract us. We like to say 
that it is the spirit that needs to be attacked, 
and that a devil of pride and lovelessness may 
live within a macerated body. Nor does the 
mortification of natural impulses appeal to us; 
for is not nature the creation of God and the 
“theatre” of His grace? 

The question is a large oné, and disquisi- 
tions have been written on both sides; but two 
lines of thought may sufhce for our Lenten 
consideration, One is quaintly. suggested by 
the old monastic tag that it is not always ad- 
visable to attack the Devil directly; once the 
Devil sees his cherished companion, the flesh, 


The Mystery of Mortification 81 


harshly treated, he generally runs away. That 
is a half-truth, but it is well worth setting over 
against the opposite half-truth—that a devil 
may dwell in a macerated body. The second 
is implied in our parable of the star and the 
leaf. The leaf that hides the star is no evil 
thing; it is a thing of innocence and natural 
beauty, yet must fall and decay. And how 
much more true that would be if the leaf, 
instead of merely hiding the star, were its 
sheath or its raw material, as the flesh is the 
sheath of the spirit and natural impulse the 
raw material of grace? 

And so we come to realize that the mystery 
of mortification is as the mystery of the star 
and the leaf, and as the deeper mystery of 
death and resurrection. The glory of eye and 
ear and touch, the subtlety of brain, the pulse 
of emotion, the grace of imagination, the 
rhythm of impulse—things that belong to the 
beauty and splendour of natural life—may 
each be the leaf that hides the star, the husk 
that imprisons the seed. And when self en- 
closes them in its base grasp, they turn from 
beauty to terror and from terror to malignity. 


32 The Finding of the Cross 


A leaf that hides a star? Our self-obsessed 
nature is a forest that blots out the sun, and 
the bitter throes of mortification become the 
birth-pangs of a new and unimaginably radiant 
life. 


CHAPTER III 
THE TREASURE OF SILENCE 


“WHEN I came into the silent assemblies of 
God’s people,” wrote Robert Barclay, the blus- 
tering and argumentative Laird of Ury, two 
centuries ago, “I felt a secret power among 
them which touched my heart; and, as I gave 
way unto it, I found the evil weakening in me 
and the good raised up.” This was said of a 
Quaker meeting; it might have been written 
of a Catholic retreat. 

The self-conscious and garrulous nineteenth 
century saw in silence little more than a com- 
mercial and prudential virtue and the neces- 
sary habit of the thinker and the artist. Re- 
ligious silence it regarded as the outworn 
superstition of monks and nuns. To-day we 
are rediscovering religious silence, and thou- 
sands of simple, practical, everyday people are 
finding in it, not only a refuge from the din 
of controversy and the fret of small activities, 

33 


34 The Finding of the Cross 


but a sanctuary where they hear the voice of 
God—a place of revelation and healing and 
power. 


I 


Few of us use Lent sufficiently as the great 
opportunity for discovering the hidden treas- 
ure of silence. I have been looking through 
a collection of parochial leaflets giving such 
simple suggestions for the observance of Lent 
as the average man and woman can adopt. 
One feels that the writers of these leaflets were 
often at a loss to find really practical sugges- 
tions. Fasting is all but impossible for the 
toilers, the sick, and the bitterly poor; vigils 
are out of the question for the thousands who 
have to work up to the very limit of their 
strength ; almsgiving can obviously not be prac- 
tised by all; additional time given to prayer, 
spiritual reading and devotions is possible for 
many, but may, in not a few cases, only serve 
to strengthen the delusion of self-deceived souls 
who need, not to say more prayers, but to turn 
from evil and learn to do well. In not one of 
these papers have I found an allusion to a Len- 
ten discipline which can be practised by all— 


The Treasure of Silence 85 


the discipline of silence. Everyone can take 
from his working-day at least twenty minutes, 
generally given to unnecessary conversation or 
newspaper reading, and keep silence. And 
competent instruction in this difficult art, 
suited to the needs of various types of people, 
is sorely needed. 

For silence is an unexplored country, in 
which the traveller may easily lose his way. 
Not a few of us have, in fact, lost our way. 
We have read certain little books, miscalled 
mystical, which speak of “going into the 
silence,” and give elaborate instructions for 
getting there. And, in the end, we have found 
ourselves in a state of idle day-dreaming, or 
morbid introspection, or weakening self-hyp- 
notism. Or we have followed the will-o’-the- 
wisp of “the Christ within,” as interpreted by 
such books, and discovered—or, what is still 
more fatal, failed to discover—that it was only 
another name for a subtle form of self-worship. 
Christian silence is not a piece of amateur 
psychotherapy; it is a great, practical discipline 
which makes a highway for God through the 
wilderness of our disordered thoughts and un- 
controlled emotions. It is not an empty space 


36 The Finding of the Cross 


filled with shadows, or a mirror flinging back 
our own portrait; it is the response of our 
whole being to the call of God. In it the soul 
stands at attention. It is a great stillness, pre- 
cisely because it is a great activity. Father 
Baker, writing of this silence at its highest 
point, compares it to the stillness of the soaring 
bird. The bird’s wings are suspended, mo- 
tionless; but all the time every muscle is con- 
tributing its share to that noiseless cleaving 
of the air which is at once perfect rest and sus- 
tained activity. 


IT 


We often complain that profitable silence is 
impossible for us. It breeds discomfort and 
restlessness, or degenerates into “wool-gather- 
ing.” More often still, it is filled with the 
buzzing of small distractions. The petty wor- 
ries and foolish thoughts which are forgotten 
in the bustle of work or the pleasures of social 
intercourse loom large and insistent the mo- 
ment we retire into solitude, and the silence 
which should be as the stillness of open spaces 
becomes more narrowing and futile than the 
most gossipy drawing-room. 


The Treasure of Silence 37 


One reason for this is obvious. We need 
not imagine that we can pass at a bound from 
a daily round, in which talk—and often very 
small talk indeed—swallows up three-fourths 
of the soul’s energies, to a state of revealing 
stillness. The practice of silence must begin, 
not in the quiet half-hour, but in the office, the 
home, the street, the playground. The soul 
whose strength has been allowed to ooze from 
it during eleven hours of the day need not 
imagine that it would be able to regain it dur- 
ing the one remaining hour. To put it quite 
plainly, the first step towards the silence that 
recreates is to hold one’s tongue more fre- 
quently and to better purpose in the ordinary 
ways of life. To spend one Lent in preparing 
the right background for our daily time of 
silence is doubtless no easy matter, but no one 
who has tried it will ever regret the labour. 


III 


What is to be the objective, the particular 
and definite purpose, of our Lenten silence? 
Three aims suggest themselves: self-discipline, 
self-knowledge, and attention to the Presence 
of God within the soul. 


38 The Finding of the Cross 


Self-discipline is the most obvious of these 
aims. We begin Lent with the penitent con- 
fession of sin and failure, and the burning 
question is how to amend. Immediately our 
thoughts fly to self-improvement. We go over 
the depressing catalogue of our misdoings, 
and realize that, while some were due to malice, 
all have their root in weakness. That weak- 
ness may be culpable; it is the result, for the 
most part, of a relaxed, undisciplined, self- 
indulgent habit of life. Clearly, the remedy 
is to “tighten up” our lax fibre, to put the curb 
upon our untutored impulses. And, if the 
practice of silence will help us to do that, let 
us welcome silence, especially since it is a 
means of self-discipline so easily within our 
reach. | 

We remember, perhaps, Thomas Carlyle’s 
praise of silence: “Silence is the element in 
which great things fashion themselves together, 
that at length they may emerge full-formed 
and majestic into the daylight of life, which 
they are henceforth to rule. . . . Do thou thy- 
self but hold thy tongue for one day, and on 
the morrow how much clearer are thy pur- 
poses and duties; what wreck and rubbish have 


The Treasure of Silence 89 


these mute workmen within thee swept away 
when intrusive noises were shut out!” And 
so we resolve upon the faithful keeping of our 
daily Lenten silence, in the hope that it will 
infuse vigour into our feeble purposes, that 
with braced wills and purged desires we may 
redeem the wasted years. 

All this is very natural, and, up to a point, 
it “works.” The only difficulty is that self- 
improvement, however laudable, is not Chris- 
tian repentance, and that the character it pro- 
duces is, at its best, Protestant and Puritan, 
and, at its worst, either Pharisaical or pagan. 
We are called to Lenten discipline, not that 
we may set about to improve ourselves, but 
that, by the penitence of love, we may come 
within the range of God’s redeeming and 
cleansing mercy. 


IV 


Or, again, we may give ourselves to silence 
because we feel our need of self-knowledge. 
If only we had known the weakness and treach- 
ery of our hearts, if only we had discerned the 
trend of our natural propensities, we would 
not have gone so far astray. Let us, therefore, 


40 The Finding of the Cross 


in silence, explore our souls that we may be 
saved from further delusions. 

Self-knowledge certainly belongs to our sal- 
vation, and for want of it we have suffered 
shipwreck again and again. Father Faber 
reminds us that a man needs to keep his heart 
warm by living in it, and for thousands their 
own hearts are an arctic region which they are 
content to leave unexplored. We spend our 
lives in the world of external things, until one 
day we wake to the fact that the only life that 
really matters is the buried life within the soul. 
Then we sit and look into our hearts, and we 
sicken as we look. Praiseworthy motives and 
considerations which we imagined to be most 
influential in our inner life are seen to be quite 
superficial and conventional; base motives and 
considerations which we imagined to be far 
from us are seen to dominate and tyrannize. 
Suddenly, and often with stunning force, it 
becomes apparent to us by what mean and 
unlovely things we really live. For the first 
time we drink at the well of self-knowledge, 
and its waters are very bitter. 

They are also very dangerous. To sit silent 
with one’s own intricate and shadow-thridden 


The Treasure of Silence 41 


heart is not a safe business. It breeds humil- 
lation without necessarily creating humility. 
It results in vexation of spirit rather than in 
contrition, in discouragement rather than in 
repentance. And, in the long run, it may ob- 
scure and distort the judgment instead of en- 
lightening it, for a silence that is occupied with 
self is a breeding-ground of delusions. Self 
cannot rightly reflect self. “Behold, the Lord 
is our mirror!” exclaims an early Christian 
singer: “Open your eyes and see them in Him, 
and learn the manner of your face.” It is only 
in the light of God that we shall see light. 


V 


And so we are brought to that deep, in- 
ward stillness which is “the silence of the soul 
that waits for more than man to teach.” To 
cross the threshold of that silence is not easy; 
it implies that most difficult of achievements 
—de-occupation with self. Until the obscur- 
ing shadow of self has lifted, we must walk 
among snares and pitfalls. And the veil of 
self-deception cannot be rent in twain from 
the bottom upwards; it must be rent from 
above, and by purer Hands than ours. It is 


42 The Finding of the Cross 


when we turn from our meanness to God’s 
majesty, when we steep our souls in His glori- 
ous attributes and open our hearts to His re- 
deeming love, that we become translucent to 
ourselves. It is when our silence is filled with 
the vision of the Crucified that we really know 
what we are. Then we see our sin as His 
cross, His crown of thorns, His dark derelic- 
tion. We see our meanness and cowardice in 
His eyes of love, our disloyalty in His smile 
of welcome, our selfishness in His ministering 
hands, our reluctance in His hastening feet. 

Such silence demands no great intellectual 
eifts, no high spiritual attainments; but it does 
demand an unwearied patience and a notable 
fidelity. Its fruits are often very slow to ripen, 
its disappointments are intolerable to the im- 
patience of pride. It is to many a greater 
hardship than fasting, a severer discipline than 
physical discomfort, a more humiliating process 
than self-examination. But, sooner or later, 
and often much sooner than we think, the 
Voice that cannot be mistaken cleaves the 
silence, the Touch that cannot be counterfeited 
falls upon our dullness, and the soul exclaims: 
“Tt is the Lord!” 


The Treasure of Silence 43 


This experience is not the exclusive prop- 
erty of mystics, the prerogative of leisured 
people, the birthright of the devotional tem- 
perament. It is the bush that may burst into 
flame for the simplest keeper of sheep, the well 
that may spring up in the desert for the most 
ignorant Hagar-soul. Books of direction only 
confuse; nothing is needed but the faith that 
waits for God, the humility that is not offended 
at His long tarrying, the fidelity that stands 
alert through the long night of desolation. 
The treasure of silence is in very deed the 
treasure of the humble and the wealth of 
beggars. 


CHAPTER IV 
THE GLORY OF PATIENCE 


To say that Lent is a school of patience is to 
suggest to many minds a somewhat colourless 
virtue—a sturdy bit of grey homespun, de- 
cidedly serviceable but hardly attractive: on 
its positive side, the prudence of men of the 
world and the wisdom of men of business; on 
its negative side, a virtue of the cloister. But 
Christian patience is woven'on no earthly loom. 
No earthly hands hold the shuttle that threads 
its web with the scarlet of a courage that can 
spend a lifetime in the trenches and have nerve 
to spare to go “over the top” at the end; the 
green of a hope that can live with a mocking 
past and sing in the face of a threatening fu- 
ture; the blue of a faith that can sit in the 
dark and see the land that is afar off; the 
gold of a love that can be broken and trampled 
into the dust and still remain love. 

Such patience is not a copy-book maxim: it 
rests upon the very Being of God, and to find 
it we must sink deep into that Being. “God 

4A 


The Glory of Patience 45 


is patient because He is eternal,” says St. 
Augustine, and until we live in His eternity 
we cannot know the true meaning of patience. 
It cannot be learnt from books of ascetic the- 
ology; its secret is inaccessible to mere self- 
discipline. To know it we must look long at 
Him Who hangs for us upon the Cross with 
outstretched arms to the world’s end; to prac- 
tise it we must identify ourselves whole- 
heartedly with the eternal purposes of God. 
Tertullian knew something of this when he 
said that “patience protects the whole will of 
God in man.” The practice of every Christian 
virtue brings us near to God, but to practise 
patience is to become intimate and colloquial 
with our Creator. ‘Whosoever keeps the rule 
of patience takes God for his novice-master,.” 
And if the discovery of patience is a won- 
derful adventure of the spirit, its practice, so 
far from being a dreary, pedestrian exercise, 
must be the most heroic of activities and test 
the hardness of the Christian soldier to its 
breaking-point. Lent offers us an unparalleled 
opportunity for testing and consolidating pa- 
tience at its very centre—patience with our- 
selves, and with God, in the spiritual life. 


46 The Finding of the Cross 


I 


It is a commonplace to say that the observ- 
ance of Lent, if it is not a mere formality, must 
sooner or later reveal to us how very shallow 
and brittle our spirituality really is. Before 
we have got to mid-Lent our little self-denials 
become a weariness, our additional devotions 
are an awkward burden, our self-restraints 
seem empty of meaning. And all’this is only 
symptomatic of a deeper evil. The truth of 
the matter is that our penitence has worn thin, 
and our Lenten ideal has been dimmed in con- 
sequence. At best, habit has usurped the place 
that belongs to grace. Already, we think we 
may have done enough in the way of strict- 
ness, forgetting St. Augustine’s warning: “If 
thou sayest, It is enough! thou hast perished.” 
Soon, unless we pull ourselves together, we 
shall once more be content to steer by moral 
theology—that manual of first-aid for desper- 
ate sinners—we, who have had a vision of 
Christian perfection! 

It is at this point that we read in some spirit- 
ual book—probably excellent in itself, but not 
in the least applicable to our own case—that 


The Glory of Patience 47 


the great thing at such a time is to be patient 
with oneself. It is no use getting angry be- 
cause one has failed to stick to one’s Lenten 
rule, or, at any rate, failed to observe it in the 
spirit as well as in the letter. Perhaps the rule 
was too hard, and it is true humility to acknowl- 
edge it, and to try and get the rule modified. 
In any case, it is no use scolding oneself: the 
thing is to go on as best one can, and to remem- 
ber that God is not a hard taskmaster, but 
knows and compassionates our weakness. 

All this is sound advice for the few; to most 
of us itis rank poison. Patience with ourselves 
does not spell self-indulgence. Its long-suffer- 
ing lies rather in unweariedly recalling the 
recalcitrant self to its first heroic purpose, set- 
ting before it high views of honour and valour 
in the service of God. Patience has no use 
for that miserable casuistry which masquerades 
as ascetic wisdom. It is not an advocate of 
mediocrity. “There are no short roads to per- 
fection,” says Cardinal Newman, “but there 
are suire ones”; and the surest way is not the 
way of concessions and dispensations. True, 
we must be patient with ourselves, but not at 
the cost of being impatient of our standard. 


48 The Finding of the Cross 


Genuine patience with self means the calm, 
steadfast, relentless upholding of that stand- 
ard in the face of repeated failures. 


II 


The first work of patience is to renew and 
deepen penitence. If God is indeed tender and 
compassionate to our frailty, sych compassion 
should create and renew a contrite heart within 
us. We must be penitent before we have any 
right to try to be heroic, and nothing short of 
the patience that refuses to yield to allegations 
of weariness and incapacity, but keeps us fixed 
in the contemplation of the Everlasting Mercy, 
will make and keep us penitent. For some of 
us this will mean resort to our crucifix—that 
wonderful compendium of both ascetic, and 
mystical theology, at once the only textbook of 
unlettered saints and the vade mecum of 
learned doctors. To look long and patiently 
at our crucified God, to keep on looking though 
our eyes remain hard and tearless, to keep on 
pondering though our hearts be dull and irre- 
sponsive, to keep on adoring though without 
a single throb of emotion—that is to have 
patience with ourselves. How much of this 


The Glory of Patience 49 


“dry” adoration, persisted in against every pro- 
test of flesh and blood and against every argu- 
ment of the inferior reason, has gone to pro- 
duce that seraphic fervour in the presence of 
the Blessed Sacrament, and the Eucharistic life 
that flows from such fervour, which we im- 
agine to be the expression of inborn religious 
genius, the exclusive property of a handful of 
saints! It may come as a surprise to us on the 
Last Day to find ourselves reproved for lacking 
some grace which we had imagined to be a gift 
to a few elect souls, but which lay well within 
the reach of our patience. How much more 
can patience bring to us God’s universal gift 
of penitence! 

We constantly repeat the stupid cliché of a 
certain school that this age is not an age of, 
penitence, because the modern mind is incapa- 
ble of that great, tragic emotion called “a sense 
of sin.” It takes no particular type of mind, 
and certainly no “great, tragic emotion,” to 
make penitents. All we need is the patience 
to face the facts of sin and forgiveness, the 
patience to lay aside our interesting little books 
and our absorbing little occupations and to 
rivet our minds resolutely to unfamiliar and 


50 The Finding of the Cross 


uninviting realities until we are subjugated by 
them. It is simply a matter of persevering 
response to grace; it is simply the patience of 
man giving the patience of God its chance. 
Our hearts are not made of different stuff from 
the hearts of the saints; the difference between 
us and the saints is that they held their hearts 
still and gave them to be broken. And that 
means patience, for the grace of God has a 
slow stride, and the broken and contrite heart 
is not attained by a Coué formula. 


III 


And having renewed our penitence, patience 
will re-create our heroism. It may be that the 
Lenten rule we have decided upon was too am- 
bitious and needs to be modified, but that is not 
very likely in these valetudinarian days. To 
judge by certain popular writers, it might be 
supposed that the average Catholic of to-day 
was in the habit of scourging himself with a 
contraption of razor-blades, like Father Wil- 
liam Doyle; but few spiritual directors have 
ever met those formidable ascetics. In nine 
cases out of ten, it is not our rule but ourselves 
that need “re-editing.” Our rule consists of 


The Glory of Patience 51 


small self-denials, of little acts of mortifica- 
tion, of apparently negligible religious obliga- 
tions, and yet we find their repetition irksome. 
God hides Himself; we ‘“‘don’t feel like it’’; the 
Lenten days stretch before us like a dreary 
erey road without a turning. But if we can 
hold ourselves to it, if we can remember that 
“feelings” count for nothing in the spiritual 
life, if we can steadfastly resolve to do as much 
for a hidden God as for a God Who reveals 
Himself to us, we shall, by the time Lent ends, 
have mastered the fundamental principle of 
the heroic life and be on the way to saintship. 

We say that this needs patience, and again 
we think of patience as a humdrum virtue. It 
needs one particular kind of patience, the 
patience that springs, not from a prudential 
brain or a disciplined soul, but from the very 
heart of God Himself. Here, where the spirit- 
ual life seems at its dullest, is the very romance 
of spirituality. Human hearts everywhere and 
in all ages have been thrilled by stories of chiv- 
alrous love—love that asks for no return, that 
counts no service too lowly, that assumes the 
guise of a page or a kitchen-maid to be near 
its beloved; content to be unnoticed, scorned, 


52 The Finding of the Cross 


abused; content to die without being recog- 
nized, or winning a flicker of response from 
the adored. Yet, when this great love-adven- 
ture comes to us in the spiritual realm, we vote 
it dull and futile. We are slow to recognize 
in Christian patience the interpreter of love’s 
sublimest mysteries, the guide to love’s supreme 
adventure. And so we modify our tiresome 
rule and curtail our “dry” prayers, are content 
with a defective penitence, and relinquish 
heroic aspirations, imagining all the time that 
we are imitators of St. Francis de Sales in 
being patient with ourselves. And, in the end, 
we have made another stride in the fatal art 
of self-deception, and have not become more 
patient with others or more sympathetic with 
their lapses from the heroic ideal. 


IV 


It all comes back to this. God, Who never 
wearies of a human soul, is asking, asking 
again, asking continually, the same things of 
us—little things or big things, as the case may 
be, but asking still. Our lack of response does 
not weary Him, our failures do not discourage 
Him, our defections do not chill Him. He 


The Glory of Patience 53 


comes to us on the Cross. He says one thing 
to one of us and another thing to another, but 
to each of us He says: “Give Me ail, and I 
will make you a saint.” That is the great fact 
at the back of Lent. Almighty God, strong 
and patient, is asking something of us. If He 
did not ask, our Lenten self-denials would be 
a sheer impertinence; as long as He asks, our 
fictitious patience with self in falling short of 
His demands is an insult. If our Lenten ob- 
servance means an unrelenting daily fidelity to 
a distasteful rule, in the teeth of dullness and 
“dryness,” and in penitent and patient response 
to the demands of God, we need not worry 
about the “greyness” of it all. What is grey 
to our eyes is gold in the vision of angels. 

T once heard a Lent preacher try to encour- 
age the faithful with the reminder that it was 
at midnight, when things looked darkest, that 
Christ was born. But patience does not break 
at midnight, even though not so much as one 
star show in the sky. “It was midnight, and 
Jesus was not yet come unto them.” There 
would have been a dramatic fitness in the com- 
ing of Jesus to His disciples at the blackest 
hour of the night. But God is not dramatic; 


54 The Finding of the Cross 


neither is life. Jesus came “at the fourth 
watch,” at the most bleak, weary, unpropitious 
time, the hour of lassitude and disillusionment; 
and even then He would have passed by—the 
numb lips of chilled and fear-worn men had 
to hail Him. Patience, however heroic, fails 
if it is not patience with God as well as with 
ourselves and others. The patience that can- 
not watch for Jesus until the “fourth watch,” 
and then turn to Him across the waters of dis- 
appointment, not querulously, but, as Tertul- 
lian has it, “with pure brow, free from sadness 
and irritation, with peaceful eyes, with a mouth 
sealed with discretion,” has not yet “had her 
perfect work.” It is precisely in the slow, com- 
monplace discipline of Lent that patience is 
tempered to its highest uses, and girded for 
that great night whose dawning means the 
soul’s encounter with God. That is why the 
Lenten adventure is worth our most toilsome 
effort, our most heroic endurance. 


CHAPTER WV 
THE TRANSFIGURATION OF THOUGHT 


A LaDy who was by way of being a Catholic 
had listened to a sermon upon the duty of 
using’ one’s brains in religion, in the course 
of which the preacher had enlarged upon the 
sanctity of thought. The lady was not edified. 
“Thinking,” she observed, “is so—so very 
Protestant”: a dictum which deserves to be 
put by the side of the curious opinion, held by 
not a few among us, that thinking is a specifi- 
cally Catholic process, and was first introduced 
into the world by St. Thomas Aquinas. Asa 
matter of fact, every Catholic who takes his 
daily meditation seriously is thereby committed 
to teach himself to think, and to think about 
the most profound matters that can occupy the 
human mind, It is not without significance 
that a Roman manual of meditation, very pop- 
ular a generation ago, bore the homely title, 
“Think Well On’t.” Very few of the little 
books which seek to teach “meditation without 
BD 


56 The Finding of the Cross 


tears” to present-day Catholics could sustain 
such a title—there is not very much in them 
that will bear thinking “well” on. Our writers 
have largely caught the trick of the Psycho- 
logical School—the fatal art of “thinking with 
the imagination,” of substituting impressions, 
apercus, moods and tenses of the superficial 
brain, for genuine thought. The aim has been 
to attract simple people; but, in most cases, 
they have only attracted the lazy, who are 
usually very complex persons indeed. | 


I 


Whatever be our way of observing Lent, 
there can be few who have not proposed 
to themselves a simple course of meditation; 
and meditation involves reading, since very 
few can make their meditation without books. 
Nothing could be simpler than to determine 
upon a course of meditation; nothing can—and 
often does—prove more difficult and barren. 
The question of method crops up at the very 
outset, and we spend much time in trying to 
force ourselves into moulds into which we were 
not meant to fit; or else we cheerfully shelve 
all methods and rely upon the inspiration that 


The Transfiguration of Thought 57 


never comes. In the end, we often fall into 
one of two traps: we either descend to vaguely 
pious musing, sentimental or speculative, as 
our native bent may be; or we settle down to 
a course of dry study, very useful in its way 
and an excellent discipline, but a most effectual 
preventive of meditation. We either do not 
think at all, or, if we do, our thought is not 
transfigured. We muse, but the fire does not 
burn. We drag along the ground without 
gaining even the sense of solidity which con- 
tact with the earth can give. 

Perhaps the surest way out of the difficulty 
is to begin by making it quite clear to ourselves 
what meditation really is, and what it is in- 
tended to effect. 


IT 


‘ Meditation is to think of Divine things with 
a certain end in view. That end is generally 
defined as being the application of these things 
to the details of our daily conduct. As a con- 
sequence, we spend most of the time allotted 
in drawing “practical lessons” and framing 
resolutions. That is very admirable; it is also, 
more often than not, very mechanical and 


58 The Finding of the Cross 


wooden. Our Modernist friends would tell us 
that it is very Jewish, very “Old Testament”; 
but if the hundred-and-nineteenth Psalm is 
typical, it is not at all “Old Testament.” “I 
am as glad of Thy Word: as one that findeth 
ereat spoils.” “Thy testimonies have I claimed 
as my heritage for ever: and why? They are 
the very joy of my heart.” “Thy testimonies 
are wonderful: therefore doth my soul keep 
them.” Discovery, joy, wonder—how many 
of the meditations we like to call “practical” 
evoke these things in us? And it is by dis- 
covery, joy, and wonder that our mind expands 
and our heart is ennobled. We treat them as 
luxuries, and call our poor moralizings our 
daily bread. But here also man does not 
live by bread alone, and the most truly prac- 
tical things are those we choose to call lux- 
uries. 

Supposing, then, we amend our definition 
and say that to meditate means to think of 
Divine things in such a way as to get to love 
them? Love rejoices, wonders, makes dis- 
coveries; and love is the most practical thing 
in the world, for it is the fulfilment of the law. 

At its best, such meditation is comprehen- 


The Transfiguration of Thought 59 


sive and systematic. It takes the whole uni- 
verse of Grace for its province. It is to be 
regretted that there are so few books that can 
take their place beside Bellord’s Meditations 
on Christian Dogma. Doctrine still repels the 
average lay person, who regards theology as 
the esoteric amusement of a few learned peo- 
ple; and we are waiting for the spiritual writer 
who can make the great formative principles 
of our religion to live for the ordinary man or, 
rather, who can show them to be fibres of the 
tree of life. Meditation on doctrine is inevi- 
tably difficult, and even dry, in its initial stages; 
but it is dry as practising scales is dry: sooner 
or later the “notes” of dogma will weave them- 
selves into spiritual music. To meditate upon 
Catholic teaching concerning’ God, man, sin, 
judgment, grace, salvation, the Sacraments, 
and so forth, is slowly but surely to enter upon 
a new world of wonder and beauty. The road 
to that new world may be wearisome, but it 
is only the road, and roads have an end. 


III 


We are sometimes told that the trouble with 
intellectual or doctrinal meditation is that it 


60 The Finding of the Cross 


all ends in preaching a little sermon to oneself. 
Well, why not? It is the most profound and 
sincere kind of preaching. It is when a man 
has expounded to himself the entire system of 
Christian doctrine, or the life and teaching of 
our Lord, that he has found the master-key 
to meditation. But does this not resolve itself 
into a matter of reasoning? Yes, sometimes; 
and it was while two disciples reasoned that 
Jesus Himself drew near and went with them. 
But does not such intellectual enquiry kill the 
spirit of reverent awe and wonder? It may; 
yet the Psalmist prayed: “Open Thou mine 
eyes, that I may see the wondrous things of 
Thy law.” Wonder is not the child of igno- 
rance; it is the Christian reason irradiated and 
active. There is nothing more saddening than 
to observe the decline of wonder in the Catholic 
Church. Converts enter it in the first flush of 
untutored wonder. They live in a whirl of 
joyous amazement, and their frank enthusiasm 
is smilingly regarded by older Catholics as one 
of the gaucheries of the spiritually nouveaux 
riches. But, sooner or later, the wonder wears 
thin, because it was sown in the shallow soil 
of emotion and sentiment; it had no root in 


The Transfiguration of Thought 61 


the mind. A course of systematic instruction 
or self-instruction might have prevented this. 


IV 


Lent is, indeed, a time of self-instruction— 
a time for doing intellectual “five-finger exer- 
cises,” if you like—for both new and old Cath- 
olics. If we gave ourselves to systematic med- 
itation even for a few weeks, we would be 
surprised to discover how feeble our hold upon 
fundamental principles has been, and how 
badly we lacked orientation in our spiritual 
geography. 

A priest, arguing against the invocation of 
saints, has said that, in his experience, people 
who prayed to the saints found their belief 
slip away from them in time—probably at an 
hour of crisis—and were left with their faith 
in God shaken. That is undoubtedly true to 
fact, but one cannot accept it as a valid argu- 
ment against invoking the saints. The trouble 
is that these people start with a non-Catholic 
conception of God, and then attach to that 
conception a sentimental belief in the interces- 
sion of the saints because it appeals to them 
as avery comforting doctrine. It is the super- 


62 The Finding of the Cross 


imposing of an “eccentric” patch upon an alien 
fabric, the tying of apples to a young plum 
tree. At the first strain on the fabric, the 
patch tears loose and leaves a gaping hole; 
at the first gust of wind, the apples are blown 
down and the branches of the tree broken. In 
such cases, the faith of the persons concerned 
has never been welded into one whole; it has 
remained unarticulated—a mere agglomeration 
of separate beliefs which do not follow from 
central principles by the laws of an inexorable 
dialectic. The remedy is to be found in an 
honest endeavour to “think through” one’s 
faith, a task in which the ‘ ae ais 
may outstrip the “wise man.” 


V 


But it remains none the less true that for 
some people anything like systematic medita- 
tion is an impossibility, either by reason of 
temperamental make-up or from lack of early 
training. This is where spiritual freedom 
comes in. Such souls should not force them- 
selves into the groove of any method, however 
approved, but remember St. Paul’s go-as-you- 
please prescription: “Whatsoever things are 


The Transfiguration of Thought 68 


true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever 
things are just, whatsoever things are pure, 
whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever 
things are of good report, if there be any vir- 
tue, and if there be any praise, think on these 
things.” It may be, also, that these undrilled 
spirits are particularly sensitive to inner guid- 
ance; and those who feel inclined to criticize 
their “looseness” and “subjectivity” would do 
well to remember that St. Ignatius—that mas- 
ter of strictly ordered meditation—bids us drop 
our plan and our points on the spot whenever 
we are conscious of the Holy Spirit’s leading, 
and follow that guidance whithersoever it may 
take us. 

Such souls will find their solid sustenance 
in spiritual reading. We shall do well to re- 
member here that meditation, as we know it 
to-day, is a late institution. It is, in fact, the 
result of the increasing hurry of life: an effort 
to compress into half an hour, or even a quar- 
ter of an hour, all those movements of the soul 
which an early spirituality spread over half a 
lifetime. In this earlier—and sounder—spirit- 
uality, the lectio divina, the reading of the 
things of God, occupied a central position. 


64 The Finding of the Cross 


Men trained in the Benedictine or Carthusian 
schools did not hurry to make their spiritual 
offering to God before they had received the 
material from Him. They read widely and 
deeply, and their meditation followed naturally 
from their reading. When they came to any- 
thing that attracted them, they stopped and 
exploited that vein of gold. That is medita- 
tion at its best—natural and unprepared. The 
soul comes into contact with truth, and is illu- 
minated and kindled. For many of us, noth- 
ing short of the strict Ignatian discipline is 
needed; but it is those whom, for convenience, 
one may call Benedictine spirits who know 
“that wondering joy which flows from the clear 
sight of truth’—St. Augustine’s gaudium de 
veritate, 


VI 


And the end of both ways is the same— 
to meet with God, to see light in His light, 
to give Him love for love, to respond to 
grace, to hear the call of Christ and obey it. 
It is all very simple and familiar—and diff- 
cult, as simple and familiar things are diffi- 
cult. It means the forming of a new mind 


The Transfiguration of Thought 65 


within us, it means the expulsive power of a 
new affection; and those who have much to 
part with know how that expulsive power can 
hurt to the point of anguish. 

There is, first, mental discipline, dry and 
hard. Then wonder is born, and the soul 
glows and thrills with the joy of discovery. 
Then love grows; and love brings, not peace, 
but a sword. One cannot take time to be 
alone and think well upon Divine things with- 
out meeting the Cross. What is begun in 
quiet musing ends in sharp conflict of spirit. 
Divine Love confronts us with its discon- 
certing challenge, its stern exactions. We 
wrestle with the angel in the darkness, and we 
never walk with even step again. But it is 
worth it all. And one hard, dreary Lent that 
brings us to that night is better than many 
lightly-won Eastertides. 


CHAPTER VI 
THE ADVENTURE OF ENDURANCE 


WE often hear it said that, while genius is 
rare, patient plodding is—thank God!—com- 
mon enough. That, however, is not strictly 
true. Genius may be rare, but really faithful 
plodding—not the soulless grind of the rou- 
tinier, but that well-nigh omnipotent quality 
called staying-power—is almost as rare in its 
full perfection. Staying-power is, indeed, it- 
self a kind of genius. It is not dull, dogged 
persistence; it is the magic art of going 
through a lifetime of monotonous work and 
remaining an artist, not a mechanic. To 
persevere in grey drudgery and become as 
grey as one’s work in the process is fatally 
easy. Circumstances compel most of us to 
persevere in our humdrum tasks, but the great 
question is how we persevere, and what we 
are like after ten, or twenty, or thirty years of 
perseverance? 

For endurance is a word that may cover 

66 


The Adventure of Endurance 67 


many conditions. It may mean the failure of 
the mother who begins as a noble woman and 
ends as a sour drudge; or it may mean the 
triumph of the mother whose heart can be 
broken and still remain a heart of love. It 
may mean the sober virtue of the priest who, 
through years of unrequited toil and appar- 
ently barren effort, does his duty faithfully, 
but with a dull, disillusioned heart; or it may 
mean the radiant faith of the priest who, after 
a lifetime of unrelieved disappointment and 
outward failure, can still see visions and 
dream dreams. It may be a hard servitude; 
it should be a glorious adventure. 


t 


From the earliest days of the Church there 
have been two distinct types of spirituality, 
which, by a convenient anachronism, we may 
call the Benedictine and the Ignatian. Long 
before St. Ignatius had founded his unique 
Society and imposed upon a world nurtured 
upon simpler diet that heroic, but somewhat 
sophisticated, system of holiness of which the 
famous Exercises are merely a shorthand ab- 
stract, there were men and women who found 


68 The Finding of the Cross 


their very life in multiplying verbal devotions, 
acts and inspirations, and who conceived saint- 
hood as the doing of an endless number of 
little things supremely well. When St. Igna- 
tius enforced his two great maxims, Agere 
contra in omnibus and communia non com- 
muniter, upon his disciples, he was only crys- 
tallizing the spiritual philosophy of thousands 
before him who had spent their days in that 
“acting against” (1.¢., nature and inclination) 
which gives to the humblest daily routine the 
dignity of a great religious discipline, and 
whose one ambition was to do common things, 
and the smallest of common things, in a quite 
uncommonly perfect way. This spirituality, 
in which the will plays the leading part, has 
always been a great school for saints, and 
has always attracted one type as much as it 
has repelled another. To souls which may 
loosely be described as Benedictine, it seems 
pedestrian, cramping, legalistic—producing an 
asphyxiating atmosphere in which the spirit 
cannot breathe. Such souls love the broad 
way of quiet surrender to God, feeling that 
it is not preoccupation with the details of an 
ascetic system but a lifting of the eyes to 


The Adventure of Endurance 69 


the eternal hills that makes for perfection. 
They are repelled by the scrupulous multi- 
plication of small duties, irritated by the 
munutie of formal devotions. They live in 
the clear, tender light which surrounds the 
soul that is calmly set upon its supreme Ob- 
ject, walking in the glorious freedom of the 
sons of God—strong alike to suffer and to 
enjoy. And yet, between these two divergent 
types, there is a common bond. Both live by 
sheer staying-power, and both are bent upon 
adventure—the adventure of faithful, unre- 
mitting endurance. 

In one of his famous Spiritual Conferences, 
Father Faber says some very plain things 
about the monotony of piety: “I will freely 
confess that I know nothing in the world 
to which I can compare for monotony the 
occasional drag of a pious life except either 
being detained at a country inn during a hope- 
lessly wet day, or else driving in a gig, and 
for a long stage, a tired horse which is on 
the collar the whole way.” 

Who has not felt the wearing monotony 
of the Christian life? And how often we 
would be glad if the monotony were merely 


70 The Finding of the Cross 


wearing, and not irritating and humiliating 
as well! The soul of large horizons, quietly 
fixed upon God, feels it no less than its 
brother-soul immersed in the details of holy 
living. Indeed, it often feels it more acutely, 
for there come times when, to quote Father 
Faber once more, “God Himself becomes dull 
to us. He is uninteresting, undemonstrative.” 
What monotony in any human activity can 
compare to that of prayer persevered in 
against feelings of utter distaste and repug- 
nance? 

There is the inescapable monotony due to 
the fixity of character and circumstance. All 
night we toil hard on the lake and take noth- 
ing, and it is always the same, every night— 
the same old net, the same old pond. ‘The 
temptations which conquered us yesterday, the 
old trials and pitfalls which humiliated us 
time after time have to be faced again to-day, 
and to-morrow, and every day. True, at the 
end of any night’s fruitless toil on the lake, 
we may hear the voice of the Master bidding 
us cast our nets to the right side of the ship, 
and find ourselves, in the golden morning, 
hauling in a “great draught” of reward. But 


The Adventure of Endurance 71 


meanwhile the succession of fruitless nights 
is eating into our very fibre, and we are 
glutted with the bitter experience that work- 
eth anything but hope. 

And we succumb to tiredness. Grace seems 
to have ebbed out from the shore of life, and, 
while we still endeavour to do our first works, 
we cannot keep our first love from slipping 
away. We fall into the dreary habit of doing 
good things badly. We get out of heart with 
our spiritual duties, and soon the effect is seen 
in a slipshod life. We have not ceased to 
do well, but we are weary in well-doing; 
and that is a desolating business. The path 
through the meadow has ended in a hard, 
erey road, just when we were getting tired. 
A hard, grey road and weary feet make rough 
going. 

Again, the loneliness of the struggle often 
dismays us. It takes so little to chill us with 
a sense of loneliness. If we are sensitive, the 
lift of a critical eyebrow at the “superstition” 
and “fanaticism” of our Lenten practice some- 
times suffices to breed a consciousness of 
isolation. And to more robust souls there 
inevitably comes a time when loneliness falls 


a 


72 The Finding of the Cross 


upon them like a pall. We realize, sooner 
or later, that we cannot pray or become saints 
in gangs; that we were not made for each 
other, but for God. And our loneliness is 
most afflicting, perhaps, when the heart’s cry 
for human sympathy is met with well-mean- 
ing inadequacy. The loneliest moments of 
the Son of God, we imagine, were not on 
the mountain-top alone with God, nor among 
the crowd that misunderstood Him, but sur- 
rounded by the weak love and dull-eyed sym- 
pathy of His disciples. And, in whatever 
way it seizes us, the loneliness of the spiritual 
life wears endurance thin, and empties the 
heart of courage. 


II 


To preach endurance at such times is to 
preach a bleak doctrine indeed; not because 
endurance is a bleak virtue, but because it is 
an adventure in the dark. Yet we know that 
countless souls have come to their birthright 
of radiance and triumph simply by “keeping 
on,” weary hour after weary hour, dull day 
after dull day, grey year after grey year. 
In the Life of Father William Doyle we are 


The Adventure of Endurance 73 


given the spiritual diary of a radiant soul 
that lived on the dry bread of endurance. 
Father Doyle knew himself called by our Lord 
to a life of the most heroic self-abnegation 
in little things, a life barren of even the 
most innocent comforts and gratifications. He 
loathed the very idea of such a life, his deli- 
cate health provided him with ample excuses 
for not living it, his fastidious tastes made 
it a torture. Yet he resolutely and persever- 
ingly set himself to live it, failing every now 
and then, quietly punishing himself for his 
failure, and starting again. He never “felt 
like it,” but feelings did not count in his 
religion; so he got out of bed to pray when 
he longed for sleep, went without sugar when 
he craved it, chose the most distasteful food, 
the hardest seat, the most uncongenial occu- 
pation, when every fibre of his nature shrieked 
a protest. He had had a vision of the life 
God asked of him; the rest was sheer, dull, 
dogged staying-power. It was a great adven- 
ture—how great only those souls to whom 
he brought strength and healing, and the 
fighting men who learnt to love him with 
an idolizing love on the tragic fields of 


74 The Finding of the Cross 


France, can measure, and even they quite 
inadequately. 

Or to turn to the example of one who was 
neither an ascetic nor a saint—Robert Louis 
Stevenson, Writing to George Meredith, this 
brave adventurer says: “For fourteen years 
I have not had a day’s real health. I have 
wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I 
have done my work unflinchingly. I have 
written in bed and written out of it, written 
in hemorrhages, written in sickness, written 
torn by coughing, written when my head swam 
for weakness. And the battle goes on—ill 
or well is a trifle.” 

Endurance is not a prosaic business at the 
heart of it. It is the secret of all romance, 
as well as the seal of sanctity. It is not the 
craftsmanship of the lamp that matters, when 
the Bridegroom comes late in the drowsy 
hours of the night: it is the oil that feeds 
the light. It is the oil of loyalty in the lamp 
of love that makes it a starry passion and 
not a sensual gratification. It is the oil of 
faithfulness in the lamp of faith that makes 
it a spiritual discipline and not a neurotic 
sentiment. It is the oil of habit in the lamp 


The Adventure of Endurance 75 


of vision that makes it an enduring light and 
not a will-o’-the-wisp. We all have moments 
of vision, hours of insight; but it is not until 
what we have seen and felt at such times is 
“worn in” by habits of prayer and duty that 
it becomes vital and victorious. It is the 
goodness that lasts, the love that is faithful, 
the devotion that is habitual, which makes all 
the difference between a religion of senti- 
ment ending in moral collapse and a religion 
of grace leading to spiritual transfiguration 
—between a glorious adventure and a narcotic 
hallucination. 


Tit 


Nor need we wait for the end of endurance 
to see the golden glory within the grey. “I 
am almost inclined to believe,” says a recent 
writer, “that it is the level land that is loved 
the best, land that has no beauty in itself, 
but only what it borrows from the clouds 
and the mists, the night and the morning. 
The reason Corot painted a tree as perhaps 
no other man has painted it was because he 
understood, in a special sense, the value of 
atmosphere, and this value is too often lost 


76 The Finding of the Cross 


in the beauty-spots of the world, where our 
eyes are so held that we miss, as it were, the 
soul of the picture. But it is not possible to 
miss the soul in the level country, where, there 
being nothing to break the line of vision, the 
earth takes unto itself some of the charac- 
teristics of water by acting as a reflection of 
our moods.... The greatest writers and 
thinkers have been born in the level lands.” * 

And so it is with the long, low, grey level 
of endurance. When we get down to that 
level, the elations and thrills and enjoyments 
of the naturally religious soul have been left 
behind. Our landscape is now bare of inter- 
esting or romantic features, We are alone 
in the wilderness—with God. There our only 
music is the tramp of our weary feet, our only 
beauty the still atmosphere and the overbrood- 
ing sky. Yet the wilderness is cramped with 
wonder. To say wilderness is to say miracle. 
Its sands are white with manna, its rocks 
glistening with living water. “Out of the 
wilderness a gift,’”’ as the inspired song has it, 

And the name of that gift is joy. That is 


*E, M. Martin, Wayside Wisdom, pp. 65-66. 


The Adventure of Endurance fics 


the great adventure of endurance—the birth 
of joy in the dark. On the hill-tops of life 
we work that we may play with a clear con- 
science when work is done. In the wilder- 
ness it is all work; but, as we toil, there 
exudes from our work a wonderful liquor, a 
rare elixir, the sap of an invincible joy. More 
than one saint has told us that it is not until 
we are feeling utterly bored with our prayers, 
and still pray on, that we can know the power 
and joy of prayer. It is not until we have 
worked and endured through half a long, 
dragging day, endured when we felt utterly 
dreary and heart-sick and tired to exhaustion, 
that we begin to know the meaning of spirit- 
ual joy. That is not a theory; it is a fact, 
corroborated by the great army of those who 
have endured to the end, from St. Francis 
of Assisi down to the bed-ridden pauper 
woman whose only complaint was that she 
could not sing when she felt so much like 
singing for sheer joy and gratitude. 

It is a paradox—part of that greater para- 
dox we call the joy of our Lord. Having 
endured to the end, He bequeathed to the 


78 The Finding of the Cross 


Church His joy. And still that joy, hidden 
from the impatient egoist, eluding the re- 
ligious sentimentalist, denied to the volatile 
impressionist, wells up in the heart that knows 
how to endure. 


CHAPTER VII 


THE FINDING OF THE CROSS 


Ir is a great day in a man’s life when—per- 
haps in the midst of a crowded street, per- 
haps in the stillness of a secluded sanctuary— 
he is arrested, held, enfolded by a Power not 
himself, and a voice speaks deep within his 
heart, “Behold, Jesus Christ!’ Of such a 
moment Lacordaire says that “he who has 
not known it has not known man’s true 
life.” 

But to meet Jesus Christ is to find the 
Cross. We do not always make the discovery 
at once. Our first encounter may be with 
the Divine Teacher of Galilee, or with the 
risen Son of God; or Jesus may show Him- 
self to us as He showed Himself to the dis- 
ciples, “in another form’’—in some secret and 
incommunicable manifestation, intensely indi- 
vidual, irresistibly convincing, part of the 
soul’s inalienable secret. But however radiant 
and exhilarating our first sight of Jesus Christ 

79 


80 The Finding of the Cross 


may be, the moment will come when we shall 
meet Him as His blessed Mother did—bear- 
ing His Cross. 

That moment will be one of sharp revela- 
tion. To read of the Cross and of all it 
implies is one thing; to meet Jesus bearing 
His Cross, or to stand with the sorrowful 
Mother at the foot of that Cross, is quite 
another. Up till then the Cross had been a 
comforting fact, taken on faith; now it be- 
comes a piercing challenge, a question that 
calls for an immediate answer. It is no longer 
something to be meditated upon; it is some- 
thing to be accepted, something to be borne. 
A penetrative thinker has said that we cannot 
love Jesus with impunity. We certainly can- 
not meet the Cross with impunity. Whether 
we accept it or shirk it, the encounter leaves 
a wound. 


I 


But why this challenge and this pain? we 
are tempted to ask. Is there not enough 
suffering in the world, not enough sorrow, 
even in a happy human life, that we should 
need to find it in our religion? Is not 


The Finding of the Cross 81 


religion meant to comfort, to heal, to restore, 
to transfigure life into a radiant, joyous 
thing? 

The answer lies in the very words that our 
shallow, joy-craving hearts constantly urge 
against the doctrine of the Cross. Love, we 
say, is the greatest thing in the world, and 
God is love. Love does not smite, it heals. 
Yes: the one thing in the universe that can 
give comfort and happiness is love—and to 
say “love” is to say “suffering”; to say “love” 
is to say “Christ crucified”; to say “love” is 
to say “I am crucified with Christ.” Where 
on earth or in heaven is there a love that does 
not live by pain, sorrow and sacrifice? If 
we really want to argue successfully against 
the element of suffering in religion, we must 
first argue love out of the universe. In a 
loveless world created by a loveless God, suf- 
fering would be an insult, an outrage, sheer 
folly. In a world created and redeemed by 
Love, suffering is a glorious vocation, a Divine 
energy, the very stuff of joy. But for suffer- 
ing, sin would end in despair, and doubt in 
madness. 

We speak of the problem of suffering. 


82 The Finding of the Cross 


There is a problem of suffering. But as we 
look more deeply and steadily into its inex- 
orable face, we come to know that, whatever 
problems it may propound to us, suffering is 
itself the solution of the world’s most crucial 
problem—God’s own answer to the question 
of the ages. It is the answer of Redemption 
—God’s great answering Act, in a situation 
which no mere argument can meet. We are 
beaten and bruised, and words have no power 
to heal us. But by His stripes we are healed 
—Pain answering pain, Agony interpreting 
agony, Death refuting death. We may quar- 
rel with it all, if we will; but, in order to be 
consistent, we would need to quarrel also with 
the mother-love that gives its heart to be 
broken, and the hero-passion that sheds its 
blood for home and country. Given the fact 
of sin, the only world in which voluntary 
suffering is a superfluity is a world from 
which love has been wiped out. When God 
Himself wanted to redeem a sinful world, He 
could only die for it. When Christ came into 
that world, He could only conquer it by giv- 
ing Himself for it. When the Church was 
established upon earth, she had to be “born 


The Finding of the Cross 83 


crucified.” The Cross runs all through life. 
If we cannot attain to joy through it, we must 
resign ourselves to those counterfeits of joy 
with which the world is all too ready to cheat 
us. The Cross is not a gloomy thing: the only 
really joyous laughter in the world to-day is 
the laughter of St. Francis and his spiritual 
descendants; the only true gaieté de ceur is 
the gaiety of St. Philip Neri and his merry 
family. 


ae 


And so, as Lent deepens to Passion-tide, 
we may discover or rediscover, the Cross, and 
find, hidden deep in the field of grace, the 
priceless pearl of sacrifice. That discovery 
is not made by way of intellectual enquiry, 
emotional expenditure, or artistic apprecia- 
tion. There is only one way of really finding 
the Cross, and not merely looking at it, and 
that is by making common cause with the 
crucified Lord. ‘This is an age that talks 
loudly of sympathy, and to find the Cross is 
to enter into a state of sympathy with Jesus 
Christ. But the sympathy demanded by the 
Cross is a very definite, distinctive, profound 


84 The Finding of the Cross 


thing, miles removed from the shallow senti- 
ment which so often bears the name. 

Its first expression must always be, not 
commiseration or companionship, but peni- 
tence. The Cross is the judgment-seat of 
Love, and when Love is judge, the most 
blameless may well abase himself in dust and 
ashes. The Cross of Jesus is the great trib- 
unal of penance. Before it sentimental de- 
votion and eloquent protestation die. The 
whisper of penitence is the only language fit 
for that great Court. 

So our first contact with the Cross is made 
at the tribunal of penance. In approaching 
it we detach ourselves from the superficial, 
easy-going, delusive attitude of the conven- 
tional church-goer, who is content to be one 
of, say, three thousand “miserable offenders,” 
and does not mind even saying so, once a 
week, in their company. Discarding the pro- 
tection of the herd, alone with our own sin, 
we kneel before Almighty God in the Sac- 
rament of Penance. We know our sin—defi- 
nite, individual, characteristic—to be some- 
thing that brought the Saviour to the Cross; 
and the only attitude possible to us, once we 


The Finding of the Cross 85 


see that, is humiliation, shame, sorrow, a con- 
trition not emotional or passionate it may be, 
but entirely honest and humble. We ask for 
judgment, for correction. We do not pre- 
sume, nor describe ourselves as ‘“‘sympathiz- 
ing’ with our crucified Judge. Yet a really 
contrite confession is the great fundamental 
act of sympathy with Christ. For it means 
to think about sin as He did, to be of one 
mind with Him regarding that which gave 
the Cross its bitterness. Failing true peni- 
tence and humble confession, all professions 
of sympathy with our Lord are hollow, and 
the thought of suffering with Him is a pesti- 
lent delusion. 


{it 


To the penitent there comes the call to 
accompany his Lord to the Cross. Our small- 
est acts of self-denial, the simplest Lenten 
rule, may be a vital moment in the history of 
that companionship; a lifetime of appalling 
austerities may fall entirely outside it. What 
is commonly called “asceticism” does not even 
begin to be Christian until its every act is 
offered to God in humility, contrition and love, 


86 The Finding of the Cross 


in union with that supreme Sacrifice which 
alone gives our self-denials value. Otherwise 
it remains, at its best, the noble violence of 
the seeker after God; at its worst, the love- 
less fanaticism of the Pharisee. 

As we begin as humble learners in the way 
of the Cross, not blighting our imagination 
with a gloom that dishonours the Great Joy- 
bringer, yet in the seriousness of unreserved 
surrender, something of His suffering will 
inevitably fall to our share. We may not 
be caught up into the consuming fire of His 
passion, but we shall surely feel something 
of the chill loneliness of His endurance. We 
shall know loneliness among our fellows, and, 
perhaps most of all, among those who with 
us follow in the way of the Cross. Why it 
should be so is a perplexing problem, the roots 
of which strike deep into the mystery of per- 
sonality, human and Divine. It certainly was 
so with Jesus. When He rode into Jerusa- 
lem, the Pharisees who stood by and scowled 
understood Him better than the crowd that 
sang “Hosannah.” The Pharisees knew that 
He had come to destroy what they had built 
—hatred can be very clear-sighted at times. 


The Finding of the Cross 87 


When Jesus stood before Pilate, His enemies 
who cried, “Away with Him! Crucify Him!” 
understood Him better than the disciples who 
slunk away in grief and fear. The disciples 
looked upon Him as the Saviour of the nation, 
who would have restored the Kingdom of 
Israel had He only been strong enough to 
avert capture and death. The leaders of the 
nation recognized that He was a peril to 
nationalist ambitions; that, as long as He 
was allowed to live, they would have no chance 
with the people. And we may, in quite 
humble, homely ways, reproduce that experi- 
ence; only the courage of love can bear us 
through. 


IV 


But there is a deeper loneliness—the mo- 
ment when the disciple can no longer under- 
stand his Master; when, our friends having 
ceased to sympathize with us, the One Friend 
seems to turn away and leave us with our per- 
plexity. Writers and preachers have moved 
us deeply again and again, as they waxed 
eloquent over the loneliness of the misunder- 
stood Christ—lonely in the home at Nazareth, 


88 The Finding of the Cross 


lonely in the crowd, lonely among His dis- 
ciples, lonely in His supreme agony; misun- 
derstood by all, even by His most holy Mother, 
denied by the generous-hearted Peter, for- 
saken by the disciple He loved best. Noth- 
ing 1s wanting to complete the picture of 
utmost loneliness. But there is another side 
to that picture. If a sword pierced the heart 
of the forsaken Christ, did it not also pierce 
the heart of those who forsook Him? Was 
there no sword in St. Peter’s heart when he 
heard the intolerable news of the approaching 
Cross, and cried out: ““That be far from Thee, 
Lord”? Was there no sword in the heart 
of St. John and the others when their hopes 
were so inconceivably shattered, their convic- 
tions so fatally shaken? 

And so there may come a time when we 
also shall be unable to understand Jesus 
Christ, when we too shall feel the loneliness 
of separation from Him. It comes to most 
of us in one form or another. Our plans 
are upset just when we had framed them in 
obedience to what we conceived to be the call 
of Jesus. We may: become conscious of an 
interior demand, of something being asked 


The Finding of the Cross 89 


of us by God which runs entirely counter to 
our previous conception of His will for us. 
Or, perhaps, most mysterious of all, we may 
find ourselves unable to discern the will of 
God, left face to face with a silent Christ, 
unable to see His working in our lives, yet 
conscious only that an unknown Hand is shap- 
ing them into a pattern that seems to make 
no sense. We work, and our work is taken 
away from us; we love, and are left lonely; 
we pray, and God is silent when even His No 
would be a blessed relief; we follow Jesus 
along a hard road, and at great cost, and 
Jesus leaves us. In such hours we can only 
endure; it is not until they have passed that 
we know how entirely we have been with 
Jesus all the time, how deeply we have been 
admitted into the Divine friendship. 


V 


_ There is a further discovery of the Cross 
—the fellowship of Christ’s sufferings for 
the sake of His Body, the Church. But while 
it too is a finding of the Cross, it belongs 
essentially to the fellowship of the ascended 
life of our Lord—to that miraculous region, 


90 The finding of the Cross 


“the other side of Lent,’’ where the soul that 
has kept her fast with her Lord may enter 
into His joy, the joy that is woven out of 
sorrow, the triumph that is at once ease and 
pain, peace and a sword. 


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